The meaning of Merida

Merida are one of the biggest bike manufacturers in the world. Here’s a brief extract from a chat I had a while back with William Jeng, who is the company VP

BA; What does the name Merida actually mean?

WJ; Merida is a combination of three Chinese characters; Me means beauty, Ri has two meanings – convenience or profit, and Da means arrival. So, Merida means that we are a company that can help you reach where you are going, or reach the profit that you are aiming at. 

The pronunciation also made it easier to place the brand in the international market – as it worked in many languages and didn’t sound Chinese.

It was also a kind of statement and wish from the founder of the company to his stakeholders.

BA; Why did the company go into the bike business?

WJ; Customers (OEM) always seemed to be coming back for lower and lower prices, often months after agreements were made – and there just wasn’t room to make quality products any cheaper. The founder (Mr Tseng) saw that there was no real future in this and that the only way to be profitable was to go into the market directly (eventually). His business was in aluminium and welding technology so it wasn’t big deal to move into bicycles. There was also a lot of opportunity at that time because the Japanese Yen was very strong and it was becoming expensive to produce bicycles there, which is why the industry moved to Taiwan in the early 1970’s  - so he took the opportunity.

BA; Who were your first major OEM clients?

WJ; Initially we focussed very much on Raleigh (who were a very strong brand at that time), making complete bikes for their global market, while Giant focussed on Schwinn. 

It was the first time that Raleigh had outsourced manufacturing to another country, so we started with a few models, but we also sold Raleigh in Taiwan so actually imported high-end bikes from them too. Step by step we started producing higher end bikes for them, which is the nature of OEM.